One picture shows the iPhone’s complete evolution since 2007

One common refrain we hear from iPhone haters is that Apple has essentially gotten away with releasing the exact same smartphone every year since 2007. While this may sound clever, it’s also completely untrue: The iPhone has changed dramatically over the past seven years, as a new picture flagged by Redditor LobaltSS makes abundantly clear.

In fact, the picture shows that the early iPhones, and the iPhone 3G in particular, look positively clumsy compared with the flatter, thinner design that Apple first introduced with the iPhone 4. This also shows us how Apple obsessively refines its products, even though they’re considered cutting-edge at the time of their release: Apple probably didn’t have to radically change its iPhone design since the iPhone 3GS was already a smash-hit smartphone, but the company decided to go through with it anyway since it thought it could make a product that looked more refined and that offered a better experience.

One thing to note is that the curved rear casing that Apple dumped after the 3GS seems to be making a comeback with the iPhone 6. Since the iPhone 6 will be Apple’s biggest smartphone yet, the company apparently feels that having rounder edges will help it better fit in users’ hands and every leak we’ve seen shows that Apple is going to drop the sharply defined edges that it’s employed every since the iPhone 4. The difference, of course, is that the iPhone 6 is going to be a lot thinner than the iPhone 3GS was, so it won’t look like a step backward from a design perspective at all.